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Aug. 17, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

46:33

Goodbye, Liz Cheney | Ep. 1557

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	Liz Cheney goes down to primary defeat in Wyoming.
	We find out new details about Merrick Garland's decision to green light the FBI search of Donald Trump's home.
	And Joe Biden signs an inflation reduction act that doesn't actually reduce inflation.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
	Liz Cheney on her way out.
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	And well, as everybody expected, she would.
	Liz Cheney went down to flaming defeat last night in Wyoming.
	She lost by 37 points to a somewhat no-name named Harriet Hageman.
	According to the New York Times, Representative Cheney was resoundingly defeated by Hageman in her Republican primary on Tuesday, handing Donald Trump his most prized trophy yet in his long campaign to purge the Republican Party of his critics.
	That's the way the New York Times like to characterize this.
	I'm sure this is how Liz Cheney would characterize her defeat as well.
	And as we'll talk about in just one moment, that's not actually what happened here.
	This was not just purely about Liz Cheney did not like what Donald Trump did between November 4th and January 6th.
	It wasn't just that Liz Cheney was an opponent of Donald Trump in his statements about the election.
	She did far more than that.
	And one of the things that the media have been jumping on here is the idea that If you are not in favor of Liz Cheney, it's because you are a participant in January 6th, or because you go along with the falsehood that Donald Trump won the 2020 election outright, except for overt voter fraud, for example.
	That is not what was going on.
	It is very much in Liz Cheney's interest to push that idea.
	It's very much in the interest of the media to push that idea.
	It's very much in the interest of Democrats to push that idea.
	But it is not the case.
	According to the New York Times, Cageman, a lawyer in Cheyenne with little political following before she was lifted by Mr. Trump's endorsement, trounced Ms.
	Cheney, the daughter of a former vice president, by more than 30 percentage points, with more than 90% of the vote counted.
	Ms.
	Cheney's loss was anticipated as it was consequential.
	The leading Republican voice against Mr. Trump and vice chairwoman of the committee investigating the January 6th Capitol attack next year will no longer have her perch in Congress in which to battle a figure she believes poses a grave threat to American democracy.
	And you can see in the New York Times why exactly so many members of the Republican Party are very angry with Liz Cheney.
	It is not because Liz Cheney was an opponent of Donald Trump.
	The reason they're angry at Liz Cheney is because they believe that she was effectively acting as a useful idiot for the Democratic Party and the media in their pursuit of January 6th as a cudgel with which to beat every Republican on planet Earth, as well as anyone who would prospectively vote for Donald Trump were he the nominee for the Republicans in 2024.
	So Liz Cheney, she had sort of suggested early that she was going to lose.
	She said that today was not the end of a battle, it was the beginning of the battle.
	Well, the truth is for Liz Cheney, it pretty much is the end of a battle.
	Here was Liz Cheney yesterday leading up to the election.
	I think today, no matter what the outcome is, it's certainly the beginning of a battle that is gonna continue and is gonna go on.
	And as a country, we're facing very challenging and difficult times.
	We're facing a moment where our democracy really is under attack and under threat.
	And those of us across the board, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, who believe deeply in freedom and who care about the Constitution and the future of the country.
	Again, this false dichotomy that she is drawing right here is the reason Liz Cheney lost.
	When Liz Cheney says that anybody who doesn't vote for me is in favor of overthrowing democracy, which is the fact of what she is saying here, right?
	She says we are facing a moment where democracy is really under attack and under threat.
	And those of us across the board who believe deeply in freedom and who care about the Constitution, I think we have an obligation to put that above party.
	The idea here is that if you oppose Liz Cheney in her primary, the reason that you are doing that is because actually you oppose democracy.
	Actually, it is because you're in favor of what happened on January 6th.
	Actually, it's because you believe that the election was stolen outright.
	And again, that is not what is happening here.
	This delusion, however, drove Liz Cheney into a political box canyon because the media are cheering her today.
	The same media that hated her dad.
	They made an entire movie about how evil her dad was called Vice by Adam McKay, who's won an Oscar.
	In which Christian Bale plays the most evil Darth Vader-esque figure in human history, Dick Cheney.
	And the same people who labeled the Cheney family, Halliburton War for Oil, the same people who saw Liz Cheney as the scion of a terribly evil political dynasty, now they are cheering Liz Cheney.
	And apparently it doesn't occur to Liz Cheney to ask to herself, why?
	Why is it that she is receiving these outside support?
	It's as opposed to, you know, the thousand other Republicans in Congress and in positions of power around the country who did not agree with Donald Trump's statements between November 4th and January 6th.
	Why is she getting all of this credit?
	So for Liz Cheney, the self-serving answer is because I'm better than all those other Republicans because I'm the one who's standing up for truth and dignity and honor in the face of Donald Trump's predations.
	But the real answer is that the media love Liz Cheney because they believe that they can use her as a tool against the Republican Party.
	They can use her as a tool, not just against Donald Trump, but against conservatives more broadly.
	And so they love this race.
	The way that Liz Cheney characterized this race is the same way Democrats in the media would characterize this race.
	It's very clear that Liz Cheney buys into this narrative from her concession speech.
	So she says, listen, I would have easily won this primary, except I decided to defy Trump.
	So here is Liz Cheney in her concession speech, which was really a sort of defiant, I'll be back and I'll be back stronger than ever speech.
	Two years ago, I won this primary with 73% of the vote.
	I could easily have done the same again.
	The path was clear.
	But it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election.
	It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic.
	That was a path I could not and would not take.
	When Liz Cheney says that she is the only righteous person in all the world, she's fibbing to you, and that is indeed the line.
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	Again, to repeat the direct quote there, because it really is the crystallization of the reason the media love Liz Cheney and the reason Liz Cheney is doing what she's doing.
	She said that in order to win, she would have had to go along with Trump's lie about the 2020 election.
	She wouldn't have been able to say something like, Donald Trump, I don't believe that he won the election based on the vote count or based on the electoral college, and still been able to win a seat.
	That basically the only way to win as a Republican is to go along with the untruth that Donald Trump overtly won the 2020 election.
	That is not true.
	It's clearly not true.
	There are many, many Republicans, ranging from Dan Crenshaw in Texas to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, who have not come out and said that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
	In fact, I'd say that the majority of elected Republican officials have never said that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
	They've posed questions about, for example, the role of the media in the 2020 election, questions that I think are entirely fair.
	They've posed questions about big tech censorship.
	They've posed questions about the changing of the rules prior to the 2020 election that allowed for vast Ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots.
	They've talked about a lot of those things.
	But to my knowledge, the sort of notion that every Republican official in the country who's won a primary did so based on backing Donald Trump's falsehoods that overt voter fraud decided in 2020, that's not true.
	I mean, it's just not true on a factual basis.
	And then she continues, right?
	She says, it would have required that she enabled the ongoing efforts to unravel the Democratic system and attack the foundations of the Republic.
	So there's now a dichotomy between Liz Cheney, the righteous, Who is going to stand against unraveling the Democratic system and every other Republican.
	Because what she's really saying when she gets defeated by 30 points is that the vast majority of the Republican Party is now in favor of unraveling the Democratic system and attacking the foundations of the Republic.
	She says it was literally impossible for her to win a primary in the Republican Party in Wyoming, which is almost entirely Republican.
	It would have been entirely impossible for her to win that primary without backing the unraveling of the Republic and the lies about the 2020 election.
	That's not true.
	That is not, in fact, the case.
	It is an incredibly self-flattering view of what exactly she is doing here.
	And it's that self-flattering view that Republicans, I think, broad scope object to.
	Listen, when Liz Cheney, there was a move very early on after January 6th to oust Liz Cheney from the House Republican leadership.
	And Kevin McCarthy, who is the minority leader, he basically quelled the rebellion inside the House Republican Caucus because Liz Cheney had made a lot of very loud noises about January 6th.
	And she was able to retain at that time her top seat in the Republican Caucus.
	And I was one of the people who said, listen, she's allowed to have her opinions about January 6th.
	And frankly, I think that many of the things she says about January 6th and its evils were not incorrect in January of 2021.
	So she was able to retain her seat at that time.
	The morphing of Liz Cheney happened when she decided to become a front person for the Democratic Party and for a media narrative, which suggested that the only way to oppose the actions of January 6th was to say that you will never ever, under any circumstances, vote for Donald Trump ever again.
	That the only way to oppose Donald Trump's falsehoods between November 4th and January 6th was to back a Democrat or to do an investigation that drew a bunch of links between disparate points that have yet to actually be linked.
	That basically you have to become a stooge on behalf of the Democratic Party, and Merrick Garland at the DOJ, and all the rest of the apparatus that is explicitly designed against half of the American people at this point.
	That is the lie that she tells herself, and it's the thing that everybody, I think, objects to.
	It doesn't help, of course, when you start comparing yourself to Abraham Lincoln.
	Typically speaking, you don't want to compare yourself to Abraham Lincoln.
	You let other people make those comparisons, but Liz Cheney just goes right for it here.
	The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all.
	Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our Union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.
	Okay, so apparently Liz Cheney sees herself in this mold.
	And again, this is not a shock because her dad, Dick Cheney, former vice president, he actually cut an ad in the middle of his campaign in which he said that Donald Trump presented the worst threats to the republic in American history, which of course is wildly untrue.
	I'm sorry, Donald Trump is not in the list of top 10 in terms of America.
	Like, you have to be totally ignorant of American history to believe that Donald Trump is the most threatening figure to American democracy in history.
	I mean, we had a full civil war in this country.
	We had a fully segregated South for a hundred years in this country.
	We had a spate of massive bombings across the United States in the late 60s and early 1970s.
	There have been a lot of problems in the history of the United States.
	But, again, when you draw that dichotomy, that is why people are objecting.
	As it turns out, while Dick Cheney is saying that the worst thing facing America is Donald Trump, most Americans actually think that the worst thing facing America is, you know, the economic turmoil that we're facing, like inflation, the possibility of recession.
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	So the woman who defeated Liz Cheney, who up until now had been completely anonymous, Harriet Hageman, she made a statement.
	She said, listen, the reason that Liz Cheney is gone is because no one cares about the January 6th committee.
	And to a certain extent, that's right.
	Republicans don't care about the January 6th committee because they figure that the January 6th committee is making claims that they just can't back up.
	The January 6th committee keeps saying that Donald Trump is responsible for the riots because he was actively coordinating with people in order to overthrow democracy.
	And they've not been able to connect those dots.
	They've been able to show, for example, that Donald Trump, all the stuff we already knew, that Donald Trump was working with his lawyers to put pressure on various states to decertify their elections.
	They've not been able to prove that Donald Trump actually knew that he lost the election because Donald Trump is uniquely capable of convincing himself of pretty much any proposition.
	But the claims of the January 6th committee made have not been supported.
	Remember, their opening statement was, we're going to prove that essentially Donald Trump is responsible for an insurrection on January 6th.
	They haven't really been able to do that.
	Harriet Hageman was like, well, guess what?
	Most Republicans aren't interested in electing Congress people whose first move is to join in that lie, which again is really not even designed to Donald Trump.
	I mean, what you have to understand is that the Democrats immediately after January 6th decided that this was going to be a tool in their arsenal against the conservative agenda writ large.
	It was not just about January 6th.
	It was not about let's all come together and condemn riots at the Capitol building.
	That is not what this was.
	And Liz Cheney decided that she was going to be complicit in that, which is why Republicans are angry.
	Here's Harriet Hageman, the woman who just defeated her.
	Part of her speech was a continued vow, Harriet, to make sure Donald Trump never steps foot in the White House after what happened on January 6th.
	It doesn't surprise me that she would revert to those same old talking points, because that's really in large part what got her defeated.
	She's not focusing on Wyoming.
	She's not focusing on our issues.
	She's still focusing on an obsession about President Trump.
	And the citizens of Wyoming, the voters of Wyoming, sent a very loud message tonight.
	We have spoken, and that is not what we are interested in in terms of our lone congressional representative.
	Hageman is not wrong there, is she?
	That the voters of Wyoming are not chiefly concerned with Liz Cheney's predilection to make January 6th the top of the heap issue in the year 2022?
	So Cheney is already suggesting that she might run for president, which is precisely what anybody would do after getting their ass kicked in a primary in an entirely Republican state.
	That's the move right there, is you lose by 30 points in a primary after completely misjudging the reaction of your own party base and moving in concert with people like Adam Schiff.
	Your next move is run for president.
	Interesting move.
	Here's Liz Cheney effectively announcing that she might consider it.
	You didn't say yes or no, and that's fine if you're thinking about it, but are you thinking about it?
	Are you thinking about running for president?
	That's a decision that I'm going to make in the coming months, Savannah.
	I'm not going to make any announcements here this morning, but it is something that I'm thinking about and I'll make a decision in the coming months.
	Okay, so again, the fact that she is considering that demonstrates this does happen in politics, folks.
	One of the things that happens in politics is the strange new respect that you often receive is very, very flattering.
	When you take a position that suddenly the mainstream media back and all the people who you've spent your entire life fighting suddenly are giving you pats on the back and they're calling you a wonderful person, a person of dignity and honor.
	When that happens, it's very hard to resist.
	And Liz Cheney obviously could not resist that.
	Again, I'm not saying that Liz Cheney is a badly motivated person.
	I'm not saying Liz Cheney is a horrible person or anything like that.
	I'm saying that she misjudged what she is doing and why people are angry at her.
	And it is very flattering and very difficult to turn down the love of people who once, literally a moment ago, were condemning your family as the worst family in the United States since the Donner Party.
	It's an amazing thing when all those people suddenly start massaging you.
	And that is precisely what happened here.
	And the media continue to do that, right?
	Don Lemon, who hates the Cheney family, come on.
	Don Lemon over at CNN, he's like, listen, there's not a network in America that would turn down Liz Cheney if she looked for a commentator role right now.
	I'm not saying that she's not, you know, she is a politician and she wants to have a say in public discourse, but she also is a very famous person who will use her megaphone and her platform to keep saying the kind of thing that she said, and she will get attention.
	She will get a lot of attention.
	So we'll see.
	And there isn't a network who will turn her down if she offers or she wants to come on.
	So she'll be able to discuss all of it.
	I mean, look at all these people.
	They're long faces.
	They're deep upset about Liz Cheney going down to defeat.
	They wouldn't have cared one fig for Liz Cheney five seconds ago.
	But because Liz Cheney is doing what they want her to do, now they are very, very excited about all of that.
	And you can see that in the way that the media have responded to this.
	The media are responding with crocodile tears over all of this because really, they love it.
	Really, they're very interested in this.
	They like this result.
	The reason they like this result is because Liz Cheney as a martyr to democracy means that the people who martyred her are all of the evil Republicans who didn't vote for her.
	Everybody who didn't back Liz Cheney, those are the people who wish to destroy democracy.
	And she's going to still be in Congress until her term ends.
	And she's still going to be out there saying the same things over and over.
	And so they're going to continue to valorize her and glamorize her and heroize her.
	They're going to continue to do all of this stuff, despite the fact that they hate the Cheney family, despite the fact that every Republican who backed Dick Cheney at this point is now looking at the Cheney family and saying, what are you guys doing?
	Liz Cheney is not going away because the media will never let her go away.
	The media's favorite thing are Republicans who turn on other Republicans.
	And make no mistake, what Liz Cheney did here by joining the January 6th committee and deciding that she was going to lead up the effort not only to get Donald Trump, but to make claims broad writ about the Republican Party and anyone who opposed her.
	That is what the media love right now.
	So the media will never let her go away, which is why Politico is already scooping That she's going to be launching an ongoing organization to educate the American public about the threats to our public and to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president.
	By the way, what that's going to result in is precisely what the DOJ's greenlit search warrant is resulting in for Trump right now, which is a backlash of support.
	We live in an incredibly reactionary moment in American politics, where if the media attack a candidate on the Republican side of the aisle, the entire Republican base swings to that candidate's defense.
	If the media decide that Marjorie Taylor Greene is the worst person since Hitler, then many in the Republican base immediately decide, well, she must have a point.
	I mean, the media do hate her.
	And so when Liz Cheney attacks Donald Trump, the predictable result is not going to be Donald Trump becoming less popular inside the Republican Party.
	It's going to become Donald Trump becoming more popular inside the Republican Party.
	Liz Cheney has to know that.
	And yet Liz Cheney is doing that anyway, which suggests that her desire to get rid of Donald Trump is at least somewhat self-serving.
	Because again, if you know that if you do A, then Donald Trump is more likely to become president.
	And if you don't do A, Donald Trump is less likely to become president.
	But you do A anyway.
	I don't know what to tell you.
	Are you delusional?
	Or are you simply more concerned with your own posturing than you are with actually achieving your desired result?
	I mean, I'm saying if Liz Cheney wants Donald Trump not to be president anymore, what she really needs to do at this point is be quiet.
	Because, again, this is the way politics works.
	If Liz Cheney attacks Donald Trump and she's made herself deeply unpopular with the Republican base, every Liz Cheney attack that is now trumpeted and broadcast by the media is going to solidify support for Donald Trump inside the Republican base.
	Again, this is exactly what is happening right now with the DOJ and the FBI searching Donald Trump's house in Mar-a-Lago.
	When they did that, all of the Republican base went, just in a second, reverted right back to, we love this guy.
	Because man, if they're attacking him, he's got to be on our side.
	So Liz Cheney is going to stick around for the foreseeable future to the plaudits of the media.
	And the person, by the way, who's going to benefit from that is actually Donald Trump.
	The person who's going to benefit from that, counterintuitively, is, in fact, Donald Trump.
	Speaking of which, the continuing hubbub over the search warrant delivered by the FBI and the grabbing of Donald Trump's passports.
	They, in fact, did grab his passports and then they had to return them.
	They suggested it was sort of a mistake because they were grabbing every paper they possibly could.
	You know, grabbing like his phone bill, like everything they grabbed when they went into Mar-a-Lago's very broad search warrant, as we discussed yesterday.
	Well, now it turns out that Merrick Garland actually weighed searching Trump's Mar-a-Lago for weeks, according to the Wall Street Journal, which undermines the idea that this was a vital national security import.
	Remember, we were originally told here that the search warrant had to be served because Donald Trump Had nuclear secrets in his closet in a box.
	And if the Chinese somehow sneaked in a manservant to go grab all of those documents, suddenly China would have the nuclear launch codes to the American missiles.
	Well, if it was that urgent, then why exactly did Merrick Garland's search warrant allow for like a two week period to actually carry it out?
	Why'd we wait 18 months before this search warrant was actually delivered?
	Why exactly was Merrick Garland considering for weeks what was going on here?
	According to the Wall Street Journal, that's precisely what was happening.
	Merrick Garland was asked about this search warrant several weeks ago, and he considered it, and then he decided to go forward, and we still don't know exactly why.
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	So according to the Wall Street Journal here.
	Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump's Florida home.
	People familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months.
	The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior DOJ and FBI officials.
	The people said the warrants allowed agents less money to seize classified info and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.
	By the way, the key words there are other presidential material.
	That's why that search warrant was so broad.
	Originally, the idea that this was done in order to shore up the holdings of the National Archives, that's a joke.
	That's obviously not what this is about.
	As I said yesterday, it was a deep sea fishing expedition.
	And maybe they come up with something.
	I have a feeling that probably they will not.
	Garland now faces a more momentous decision that will further sharpen an already unprecedented and politically fraught situation, whether to pursue charges against Trump or any of his allies over their handling of the records at issue and their interactions with DOJ officials seeking to retrieve them.
	A decision to bring charges in the matter would thrust the DOJ deeper into the political environment in which the former president's supporters and Republican lawmakers are already accusing Mr. Garland and the Department of Overreach.
	Again, there are people yesterday in the media who are comparing this to Al Capone, that we know Trump is guilty of something.
	We know that he's a bootlegger.
	We know that he's responsible for the St.
	Valentine's Day massacre.
	We know all those things, but we can't get him on that.
	Let's get him on tax evasion.
	Well, if the way that you get Donald Trump is he had a couple of classified documents in his possession that he had the power to declassify, but he didn't declassify them in the way that you see fit.
	And this is how you attempt to invalidate him for 2024.
	Good luck with that.
	Truly good luck.
	I mean, I understand that Merrick Garland may shore up his own political base with that.
	He may help out Joe Biden.
	Because as I say, one of the things the January 6th committee has done is actually put the pressure on Merrick Garland and Joe Biden.
	Everybody knows the Republicans aren't going along with the January 6th committee.
	They know the Republicans are not willing to indict Trump.
	But if the January 6th committee keeps saying out loud that Donald Trump is indictable, and then Joe Biden's DOJ says he's not indictable, who do you think bears the political brunt of that?
	So the political incentive structure is in fact lined up here for Merrick Garland to bring an indictment, whether or not there is a serious basis for the indictment.
	If he does not do so, he's likely to feel the heat from the Democratic Party, and so is Joe Biden.
	Which makes this a politically motivated prosecution.
	I mean, that's what it would be.
	The department on Monday asked a judge not to make public the affidavit on which the search warrant was based, as some news media outlets had sought.
	Writing in a court filing, the document contains, quote, critically important investigative facts about witnesses and tactics.
	The department wrote, quote, if disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government's ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps.
	As I said yesterday, if you're going to search Donald Trump's apartments at Mar-a-Lago, you know, it might behoove you for that to be the last thing you do.
	But what this is now saying, I mean what the DOJ is now saying, is that that is not the last thing they are doing.
	This is part of an ongoing investigation.
	This is actually step one.
	So, step one is you raid the former president's house, and probably the future nominee in 2024 if you guys keep doing this sort of stuff.
	Federal agencies have also warned about the prospect of violence against law enforcement officials in retaliation.
	Of course, this is part of the shtick here, is that the FBI unleashes its extraordinary power against Donald Trump, greenlit by Merrick Garland.
	And then, when people say, guys, this seems pretty out of bounds, this is unprecedented, then they say, well, you're stirring up violence.
	Meanwhile, apparently, according to the New York Times, Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, the White House counsel and deputy under President Trump, were interviewed by the FBI in connection with boxes of sensitive documents that were stored at Trump's residence in Florida after he left office.
	Cipollone and Philbin are the most senior people who worked for Trump, who are known to have been interviewed by investigators after the National Archives referred the matter to the DOJ this year.
	The interviews are a sign of the intensity of the investigation into how sensitive government material left the White House with Trump and remained at his Palm Beach, Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, for more than a year.
	Philbin was interviewed in the spring, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.
	As investigators reached out to members of Trump's circle to find out how 15 boxes of material some marked classified made its way to Mar-a-Lago, it was unclear when Cipollone was interviewed.
	Okay, so again, this is spring.
	So if they actually thought that there was a national security problem with these documents sitting and moldering in Donald Trump's closet, You wait for months to go and grab them?
	And then you do so under the basis of a National Archives request?
	I don't think so.
	Cipollone and Philbin were two of Trump's representatives to deal with the National Archives.
	Their names are the positions shortly before the president's term ended.
	Another was Mark Meadows, the former White House Chief of Staff.
	At some point after National Archives officials realized they didn't have Trump's White House documents, which are required to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, they contacted Philbin for help returning them.
	Philbin tried to help the National Archives retrieve the material, but the former president repeatedly resisted entreaties from his advisors.
	It's not theirs, it's mine, several advisors say Trump told them.
	Among the items in the boxes packed up from the White House residence as Trump was departing was Trump's correspondence with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as well as a letter to Mr. Trump from former President Barack Obama when Obama departed the White House.
	Okay, and so you're going to arrest him for this?
	There are also a variety of other documents that traveled to Mar-a-Lago.
	Again, we don't know what those documents are.
	We don't know what the documents are that have been sought.
	But if you're talking about counterproductive moves by people who are opposed to President Trump, This would be the apotheosis of it.
	And undermining institutional trust in order to go get Donald Trump is not going to, I think, redound to Democrats' benefit the way they think that it will.
	It also doesn't help when you have members of the media like Don Lemon out there proclaiming that the FBI is absolutely trustworthy.
	Anybody who has any doubts about why they would do this sort of thing must be crazy.
	Here is Don Lemon, who hated the FBI until about 37 seconds ago.
	Here is Don Lemon on CNN last night.
	Now Rudy Giuliani is a target in Georgia's investigation of one of the greatest threats to our democracy in history.
	And what is Giuliani's response?
	When you start turning around lawyers into defendants when they're defending their clients, we're starting to live in a fascist state.
	For the record...
	For the record, let's just be very clear about this.
	So that people don't get it twisted.
	That no one's going after anyone.
	No one's treating anyone in the Trump administration, especially Trump, any differently than they treated other presidents.
	Does anyone believe this?
	Especially when Don Lemon says it?
	It's been fun to watch the media swivel on a dime about all the things that it used to believe.
	That's pretty fun.
	So, for example, you saw that they've flipped completely on the Cheney family.
	Now they are great heroes of the republic after they were the great villains of the republic.
	Well, now the media have also flipped on whether law enforcement is good.
	So after spending a full year in 2020 declaring that law enforcement across the board was bad and dangerous, now law enforcement is good.
	The Washington Post editorial board has an entire piece titled, The FBI is not the enemy today.
	Quote, Former President Donald Trump and his allies have veered from one wild claim to another after last week's FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
	His team insisted at first it had handed over all the relevant documents, an assertion proved untrue when the FBI recovered boxes of material marked classified.
	Then his team said without evidence Trump had instituted a standing order under which documents brought from the Oval Office to his residence were deemed to be declassified at the moment he removed them, which is implausible under declassification procedures.
	Perhaps most harmful was the suggestion FBI agents planted evidence during their time on the property.
	This should go without saying, but now, amid rhetorical and physical attacks on law enforcement agents around the country, it can't be said enough, the men and women of the FBI and Justice Department are dedicated, patriotic public servants, as Attorney General Merrick Garland declared last week.
	The Republican allies, according to the Washington Post of the former president, have called the Mar-a-Lago search an act of tyranny involving third-world tactics by a rotten-to-the-core government no better than a dictatorship.
	Calls to defund the FBI are bizarre, given the GOP has made support for law enforcement an electoral strategy.
	Opposition to an investigation that appears to have been conducted by the book is especially hypocritical, coming from the same people who cried out for imprisoning Hillary Clinton.
	Well, it's not hypocritical when you say, the FBI didn't do its job by Hillary Clinton, so if you're going to suddenly start doing your job by Donald Trump, I'm somewhat suspicious.
	That would be selective prosecution, in fact.
	But it's fun to watch the Washington Post now swivel on a dime.
	Quote, too many elected officials are fostering feelings against the FBI, casting men and women who are doing their duty as aggressors and enemies of the nation. They should instead say what Mr.
	Garland said, which is the truth. Every day they protect the American people from violent crime, terrorism and other threats to their safety. And by the way, I'm just going to note here editorial from The Washington Post circa 2021, quote, Reimagining Safety.
	Police reform is not enough.
	We need to rethink public safety.
	They say the fiercest and most potentially consequential debate is over mounting a more fundamental response to tragically familiar incidents from the police.
	The discussion has been dominated by disagreements over the meaning and merit of defunding the police.
	Some interpretations of the provocative slogan are concerning, but as we wrote over the summer, the mantra is helpful as a shorthand for an essential truth.
	We need to reimagine public safety.
	Ah yes, reimagining public safety because the police are systemically racist and discriminatory and bad.
	The Washington Post was all for it circa 2021.
	Circa 2022, anybody who has doubts about the FBI is non-patriotic.
	Now, in the end, when folks say, just trust these folks, just trust them, the people who are very, very trustful of these institutions right now are also the people who are doing the most speculating about what it is that Donald Trump has done wrong.
	So you end up with Trevor Noah, for example, saying yesterday that, you know, maybe what Donald Trump was actually trying to do was sell nuclear secrets to the Saudis.
	Now first of all, the Saudis have access to Pakistan's nuclear secrets.
	The reality is that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been operating in concert for a very long time with regard to Pakistan's nuclear program.
	But, put that aside.
	Here is just pure speculation from Trevor Noah.
	Donald Trump might have kept the world's nuclear secrets in his basement at Mar-a-Lago?
	The same place Rudy Giuliani sleeps to avoid the sunlight?
	That is so irresponsible!
	Because you realize the worst case scenario with these documents is that Trump sold them to like Saudi Arabia.
	The best case scenario is that he just lay in bed with them and rubbed them all over his naked body.
	Again, we'll just go worst case scenario here.
	Guys, when you do this, you're significantly more likely to make Donald Trump president of the United States.
	But maybe that's the point.
	Maybe the point here is make Trump the nominee so Biden can run against him.
	I mean, Biden has said that that's what he wants to do.
	I know there are a lot of Republicans who believe that Donald Trump running against Joe Biden, that's a clear win.
	That's not what the polls suggest, and it's also not what the Democrats think, and it's not what the media think.
	So maybe the Democrats are happy to play the reactionary game whereby they target Donald Trump with the knowledge that Republicans will then start reacting by supporting Donald Trump.
	Maybe that's the case here.
	Whatever the case is, undermining the institutional trust in the FBI and the DOJ in order to quote-unquote get Donald Trump is a massive mistake in a time of severe public mistrust.
	It's a real mistake.
	And the fact that the media, who hated the FBI until five seconds ago, the media that hated Liz Cheney until five seconds ago, now they've flipped on both, is somewhat telling.
	Okay, meanwhile, speaking of a dishonest media, it is incredible how the Inflation Reduction Act, which does not actually reduce inflation in any way, shape, or form, now the media are allowed to say that.
	Isn't that funny?
	Until it passed, they had nothing.
	Until it passed, it was the Inflation Reduction Act.
	If you voted against it, you were in favor of inflation, because after all, it was called the Inflation Reduction Act.
	Then it passes, and literally that moment, they're like, guys, this wasn't about inflation at all.
	Well, if you don't feel like Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act is actually protecting you from inflation, that's smart.
	But let me tell you one way you can protect yourself.
	That, of course, is rings.
	Summer is a busy time.
	You're out of the house a lot.
	I'm away from home a lot, but I know that my house is protected because I have Ring Alarm.
	Now I know what you're saying to yourself, wait a second, isn't Ring, they're the people who do the video doorbell, right?
	Well, yeah, I mean, they do that, but they also have a great alarm system that I rely upon.
	And listen, if I rely upon it, you definitely can, because frankly, there are a lot more people who want to damage my house than want to damage your house.
	Ring didn't stop with just the video doorbell.
	They've changed the home security game entirely with Ring Alarm Pro.
	That's why I've decided to team up with Ring when it comes to protecting my home.
	I've gone pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
	Ring Alarm Pro is whole home security with available professional monitoring when you subscribe to Ring Protect Pro.
	Ring Alarm Pro combines a security system with a fast Eero Wi-Fi 6 router for home security and network security all in one device.
	Plus, with a Ring Protect Pro subscription, Which is an amazing deal, by the way.
	I get professional monitoring for the ultimate peace of mind.
	If anything happens, professional monitoring will call me and can request emergency services.
	So, this summer, whether I'm across the country or across town, I know everything at home is protected and connected.
	This summer, to protect my home, I've gone pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
	And so, can you learn more at ring.com forward slash ben?
	That's ring.com forward slash ben.
	Also, My eponymous book club, Ben Shapiro's book club, is back tomorrow for a whole new episode, 8 p.m.
	Eastern on dailywireplus.com.
	This month's book, East of Eden, John Steinbeck's magnum opus.
	So I love East of Eden.
	This is one of my favorite books.
	It is a beautiful retelling of biblical stories about Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel.
	It's also a piece of magnificent Americana.
	If you haven't read it, I recommend that you watch the show tomorrow as an introduction to the book, and then you're going to want to read it even more.
	You have to be an All Access member to join in on the fun.
	So head on over to dailywireplus.com, become a member today.
	Join us tomorrow at 8 p.m.
	Eastern as we discuss East of Eden.
	I will see you there.
	So yesterday was a BFD, according to Barack Obama, a big bleeping deal.
	That, of course, is what Joe Biden, when he was vice president, said to Barack Obama upon passage of Obamacare.
	Well, now Barack Obama is returning the favor.
	He says that Joe Biden's Inflation reduction acting law.
	That is a big effing deal.
	It's BFD, man.
	It is so big.
	And the entire media have decided it's also big, but not because it's going to actually reduce inflation.
	So, for example, headline at The Wall Street Journal, quote, Biden signs bill aimed at lowering drug costs, boosting renewable energy.
	Wait, wasn't it called the Inflation Reduction Act?
	I noticed that it actually doesn't reduce inflation in any way.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden signed into law sweeping legislation to lower prescription drug prices, boost the renewable energy sector, and impose new taxes on large corporations.
	The Democrat-backed pledge is one of Biden's most consequential accomplishments since taking office, the latest in a string of legislative victories the president's aides hope will improve his standing heading into November's midterm elections.
	Republicans have criticized the measure, casting it as a government overreach, arguing it would do little to tamp down high inflation despite its name, the Inflation Reduction Act.
	And every piece here is pushing the fact that now it's about climate change and the environment and healthcare costs.
	That it wasn't at all about inflation.
	So everybody was just lying for months on end about what exactly this bill was.
	They were just pretending.
	But all of this is about giving Joe Biden a victory.
	In the end, for the media, it's all about giving Joe Biden a victory, and so a weird narrative has now emerged, which is that Joe Biden is a man who wears sunglasses.
	I'm not kidding.
	This is a narrative that is now being repeated across the media, is that Joe Biden is cool because he wears aviator sunglasses.
	Like Jack Bauer in 24 or something.
	So, for example, we have a headline from CNN, quote, Suddenly, images of Biden as a feeble, septuagenarian atop a mismanaged White House have given way to those of an experienced leader smiling behind aviator sunglasses.
	The aviator sunglasses will become a leitmotif of this particular brand of coverage.
	A quote from Vanessa Friedman over at the New York Times, a headline on their website's front page, quote, The return of Aviator Joe.
	Aviator Joe's back, just in time to take his quasi-victory lap.
	Forget the glowing eyes of dark Brandon.
	As President Joseph R. Biden arrives back in Washington, D.C.
	to enter the White House to sign the Inflation Reduction Act, it is his Ray-Ban 3025s, the dark wire-rimmed teardrop-shaped sunglasses he has made his signature, that once again seem the emblem of the man.
	Though the aviators and the big-grin, public-services-cool persona they represent never exactly went away.
	They receded into the background, relegated mostly to bike rides and similar low-eyeball appearances as the president wrestled with COVID, the war in Ukraine, inflation, and other grim issues.
	At the G7 Outdoors family photo in June, he went tieless, just like everyone else, and aviator-less.
	At the White House Easter egg roll, the glasses were similarly gone.
	But ever since Biden emerged from his COVID isolation into the sunshine earlier this month, the aviators have been front and center on his face.
	As he proclaimed his negative status in a Rose Garden speech on his trip with the First Lady to Eastern Kentucky to survey flood damage during his vacation in South Carolina.
	Symbolic, once again, of a president who, as John Harwood wrote for CNN, suddenly looks different.
	It's the attitude, as much as anything.
	Even taking into account the glare of summer, he's not just wearing sunglasses now, he's wearing shades.
	You know Joe Biden's having a good day when he wears his aviators, said Liz Smith, author of a recent book, Any Given Tuesday, and political strategist who helped craft Pete Buttigieg's political campaign.
	You know, he's having a good month when you see him day after day wearing his aviators.
	It's a sign he's on a roll.
	He's wearing sunglasses.
	Wow.
	So this human who cannot speak sentences out of his face hole, this human who's responsible for 40 year highs in inflation, an ongoing war in Ukraine without end, the possibility of another war with China, a complete pullout from Afghanistan, which led to the disastrous subjugation of 38 million people.
	He is wearing sunglasses.
	I mean, sure he falls off stationary bikes, but he is wearing sunglasses, guys.
	And we should be celebrating with him, despite the fact that y'all were lying about what exactly this Inflation Reduction Act does, because it doesn't reduce inflation.
	We should celebrate with him.
	That's the really important thing.
	So yesterday, Aviator Joe and his sunglasses of doom.
	He's like Top Gun Maverick.
	Except if Top Gun Maverick were a feeble septuagenarian who fell off of bicycles on a fairly regular basis, who shuffles along the floor so he doesn't trip over cords, and who can't speak two sentences without falling into some sort of gaping maw And Joe, I never had a doubt.
	Joe had an operation on his shoulder.
	I just want you to know it wasn't because of anything we did.
	with Joe Manchin about signing this bill yesterday at the White House.
	And Joe never had a doubt. Joe had an operation on his shoulder. I just want you to know it wasn't because of anything we did. He's in great shape.
	And Joe Biden went on to say that this bill was about showing that democracy still works.
	Yeah, democracy works by ramming through bills without any Republican support whatsoever, and doing so by basically bribing Joe Manchin with the promise of some energy exploration in his state.
	Here is Joe Biden.
	The bill I'm about to sign is not just about today.
	It's about tomorrow.
	It's about delivering progress and prosperity to American families.
	It's about showing the American and the American people that democracy still works in America, notwithstanding all the talk of its demise.
	Not just for the privileged few, but for all of us.
	Um, so it's about democracy still working, and the way you know democracy still works is that the DOJ is searching Donald Trump's home, and with entirely democratic support, Joe Biden rammed through a bill that the entire media lied about.
	That's how you know democracy still works.
	Joe Biden then sort of gave away the game.
	He said what this is really about, which is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on green boondoggles the way his predecessor did.
	This new law also provides tax credits that's going to create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and clean energy manufacturing jobs, solar factories in the Midwest and the South, wind farms across the plains and off our shores, clean hydrogen projects and more all across America, every part of America.
	This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever.
	Ever.
	And it's going to allow us to boldly take additional steps toward meeting all of my climate goals and the ones we set out when we ran.
	I thought it was about reducing inflation, though.
	I mean, Politico has a headline today titled, We've Got a Climate Law, Who Wins?
	I mean, I notice that's not about inflation.
	Speaking of Joe Biden's climate goals, I'm just going to point out that Captain Science over here and his climate goals, which have nothing to do with the actual solutions that he's putting in place to tackle climate change.
	The stuff that he is doing right now will have extraordinarily minimal effect on climate change over the course of time, as anybody honest who looks at the stuff knows.
	Or it will cost an extraordinary fortune, or both.
	That science is being driven by people like key White House climate aide Jane Lubchenco.
	She's such a great scientist that the National Academy of Sciences just barred her from involvement in all NAS publications and activities for five years for violating its code of conduct before joining the administration.
	As according to Axios, the NAS, the most prestigious science body in the United States, said the decision, effective August 8th, stems from section three of its code of conduct.
	It says members shall avoid those detrimental research practices that are clear violations of the fundamental tenets of research.
	Apparently, one of her papers was retracted.
	She edited a paper, retracted from the journal PNAS in October 2021, because the data underlying the analysis was not the latest available, and because she has a personal relationship with one of the authors, her brother-in-law.
	Well, the White House Lubchenco is developing the scientific integrity policies that the White House relies upon.
	So, really, slow clap for the Biden administration and its dedication to science.
	Meanwhile, Brian Deese, one of the White House advisors on economics, he's saying, you know what this bill really does?
	It hires 82,000 IRS agents, which is what you're interested in.
	I know you wanted more IRS agents.
	You want to pay, with your taxpayer dollars, more people to audit you about your taxpayer dollars.
	That's what you want, isn't it?
	I know it is.
	It's going to be super popular.
	The days when companies can say that they've made large profits but then end up paying nothing in tax because of complicated accounting rules, those are going to be over as a result of this 15% minimum tax.
	That's a big step forward and we're going to make a historic investment in the IRS to make sure that the wealthiest Americans that use complicated accounting and lawyering techniques to avoid paying taxes, that we're going to crack down on that as well.
	Are you excited?
	Are you super excited about bringing down inflation by hiring 82,000 IRS agents who, by the way, will in fact go after you if you make less than $400,000?
	The Biden administration keeps lying.
	They say we're not going to go after anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year.
	Then why exactly is it that the Congressional Budget Office estimates $20 billion in increased tax revenues squeezed from Americans earning less than $400,000 a year?
	Weird how that works.
	So it's not about inflation, after all.
	Now you're allowed to say it, because now it's about climate and everything else.
	Again, our media, always, always on the ball.
	Alrighty, we still have to talk about a bunch of other stuff, including the CDC's changing standards, Jill Biden getting COVID, as well as an amazing story from Boston Children's Hospital.
	They are promoting, of course, sex changes for teenage girls, hysterectomies for teenage girls.
	What?
	If you don't want to miss that, you actually need to become a member over at dailywireplus.com.

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